runs as required

Very interesting to see Julian's pair of posts: The first picture of the layout from the corner of the room really surprised me for revealing how short the DP side is relative to the Marine Yard side. And the photograph of the Outdoor Machinery Superintendant on the bridge 'shooting' the guys on the job was instructive. I'm surprised dt has not yet been 'accidentally' run over on purpose for the intensity of his spying supervision. dhig

Interesting what goes around comes around. Wasn't it Labour 'strong man' Lord Adonis, chair of the new Infrastructure Commission, who first started pushing the idea of HS2 ? And wasn't Labour's 'Infrastructure Planning Committee' something that 'Bob the Builder' Osborne abolished in his cost cutting during the early days of the Coalition? So can we look forward to an unbiased 'tabular rasa' for the new Commission's work? dhig

No it happens up the road from Durham in Newcastle as well. We went to Francescas in Jesmond to eat garlic prawns yesterday after a long mornings stint in the RVI. They always manage to make even a wet dark dismal day seem like a sunny Italian holiday. On a dry day there might even be an exotic old Iti bike like a Guzzi or a Morini propped outside belonging to one of the waiters. dhig afterthought: I remember a friend noting how Italian (and Greek) restaurants in Britain always make a point of making their interior decor look like the outside with little bits of pantile roof hanging over you and (over)ambitious murals of gardens overlooking the Bay of Naples/the Pelopannese.

1 Chewing over the Harrington bodied AEC charra's connection with railways...was it because it is acting as a replacement for the Westward Ho! light railway? Double deck Western National Bristol Ks also used to have Westward Ho! on their destination blinds. 2 Was the Austin Nash Metropolitan any less succesful than the Austin Atlantic - which used to have a rear window that wound down so you could enjoy more of its exhaust? dhig [edit] PS Isn't the Austin Nash Metropolitan Robbie Coltrane's favourite car ? If its big enough for him...

I think the really surprising thing is that Flash. the claimed highest village in England, is Staffordshire ! This is a county I usually think of as all brick and at the heart of the canal sysytem. 2 We found the road traffic in the Peak almost impossible. It was only by staying well away from the A roads that we could find peace and quiet. Once again I started wondering about how exactly did 'Blind Jack' Metcalf of Knaresborough work at finding routes through the landscape that the rail engineers like Locke capitalised on later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Metcalf_%28civil_engineer%29 Ascending Shuttlings low I could see the solid nose to tail traffic glinting in the sun over Metcalf's Cat and Fiddle road, also along the Buxton - Congleton road and even on the Macc end of his Chesterfield - Macclesfield turnpike that the LD&ECR aspired to connect by rail a century later. Driving back home it was a real relief to leave the M6 at Penrith and follow a virtually traffic free Metcalf road home over Hartside to Tyneside. We had the setting sun behind us all the way to Hexham. dhig

I do believe I see Shuttlingslow on your Heathcliff skyline above. I was lucky enough to climb the feisty little peak from Wildboarclough on a perfect day just a week ago. I could see across the Cheshire plain from Belmont moor behind Bolton right down to the Wrekin and across to the Welsh Hills! Sadly I had to leave my wife reading in the car while I was away as she has a trapped sciatic nerve that makes walking very painful. But what she told me was interesting: as a girl she lived at Fernilee on Long Hill 6 miles north of Buxton on the old A6 and the family had no car. She attended Buxton Cavendish school but had no idea the other girls in her form lived in such spectacular places as Flash (that claims to be the highest village in England at 1514 ft) and the beautiful 'white Peak' villages like Chelmorton and Monyash that we drove through so effortlessly on this visit. My youthful experience was so different. My friend's neighbour had a tandem which we borrowed regularly to go off 'potholing' through our teens (as well as watching some now long gone trains working through and over the 'white Peak'). About your reference to Emily Bronte's Heathcliff : I remember our English teacher (at New Mills) explaining that the Brontes were friends with the parson at Hathersage and stayed there a number of times. Charlotte 'borrowed' the Derbyshire name Eyre for her heroine. dhig

The other Evocative Rail Remain we happened upon was this poor old ruin: at the National Stone Centre at Wirksworth, just alongside the C&HP stone embankment. I've just discovered this interesting web page which relates its history: https://inlanding.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/rs8/ Wife's late stepfather used to be a signalman at Tunstead/Peak Forest and used to take our children along with him on backshift, but I don't remember this sad little loco that had once been a pretty young Avonside 0-4-0ST in her youth. We were lurking around the old stone quarries because long ago as a student, I clad a small building in Hoptonwood stone and received huge support from the quarry (which back in 1958 used a steam crane stabilised by elaborate triangulated trusses). dhig

Here is another sad one, not a million miles from the Midland mainline at Bakewell We were on a trip down memory lane last weekend visiting wife's surviving old schoolfriends around Buxton. We passed through Hulme End enroute to visit an old friend in Leek whose dad had been the licencee of the "Light Railway Hotel" in Hulme End. We drove up and down before it dawned on us that the pub had been renamed. http://www.themanifoldinn.co.uk/ As you can see from the above web site, all the Manifold valley's unique railway history (the Indian Barsi Light Railway origins and the famed milk tank transporter waggons) has been obliterated in favour of the ubiquitous 'coaching inn'. Strange. Its not only Communist States who re-write history. dhig

Back to those B&W kerbside 60s/70s pics: On the opposite side of the road to the Bentley Flying Spur, isn't that a Honda S800 - one of the first Japanese cars to appear on our roads? Wife's MX5 (that I'm not allowed anywhere near) is its present day descendent. dhig

Instead getting in a sweat trying to keep up with the Real World (should I or should I not tear-up my nearly weathered scissors?) why not just jump ahead and model what DP could be Tomorrow. Its the sort of bull$?!£ that comes second nature to architects... dhig

Having never really understood Bristol cars. I’ve managed to Wiki my way out of confusion about Interestingly the story begins (and partly ends) on narrow ‘standard’ gauge rails. 1875 Sir George White 1854 -1916 built up the standard gauge Bristol Tramways through the late 19C, continuing to expand and merge until he also controlled Imperial Tramways (including the Corris Railway) and London United tramways. 1906 Bristol Tramways opened its first motor bus routes. 1908 dissatisfied with its Thornycroft buses Bristol Tramways began building its own Bristol buses in the tramsheds in 1908. 1910 White formed the Bristol Aeroplane Company with his brother and son - G Stanley White - as a separate company. The companies shared the same scroll badge and were located in the tram sheds at Filton and Brislington. 1916 the Bristol Fighter consolidates the company as a major player in the aviation industry. 1919 After each World War the Bristol Aeroplane Company tried to diversify – into an unsuccessful Bristol Monobloc cyclecar after WW1 1945 at the end of WWII, more systematically, Sir G Stanley White the Bristol Aeroplane Company chairman set up a Car Division headed by son George S. M. They bought a controlling stake in Frazer Nash (AFN) which before the war had built the “Frazer Nash B.M.W.” With the support of the War Reparations Board, H. J. Aldington a Director of FN and a wartime Ministry of Aircraft Production inspector at Bristol went off to Munich. He returned with the BMW chief designer Fritz Fiedler and the rights to manufacture three BMW models and the 328 engine at the new factory at Filton Aerodrome. 1947 Bristol and Aldington fell out in January, AFN was sold off and Bristol went its own way introducing the 400 then later the 401 1954 & 1955 Bristol 450 cars at Le Mans win both the 2 litre class and the team prize 1959 Bristol Aeroplane Company merge with others into the British Aircraft Corporation (airframes), later British Aerospace, while the engines including the car division became Bristol-Siddeley Engines. 1960 Bristol-Siddeley decide to axe the car division. Sir George S.M.White (the tramking’s grandson) buys it as Bristol Cars Ltd. with Tony Crook, the London agent with Kensington High Street showroom, acquiring 40 % and sole Distributor rights. 1961 Switch from Bristol to Chrysler engines. 1973 Sir George White (never recovering from crashing his 410 in 1969) eventually sells his share to Anthony Crook who thereafter directs Bristol Cars from the Kensington showroom until 1997 when aged 77, he sells 50%. 2007 Crook finally withdraws. 2011 Bristol Cars under administration – with the loss of 22 jobs. Bought by Kamkorp who claim their Frazer-Nash Project Pinnacle will be a long range electric GT hybrid. This seems not to be the old AFN car company but has morphed out of Archie Frazer-Nash’s (note the hyphen) longer surviving military engineering consultancy. Meanwhile back to the rails… 1967 prototype 4000hp Kestrel co-co diesel electric loco built by Hawker Siddeley (as Bristol Siddeley had become) at Brush Loughborough. With a single Sulzer V16 it was intended to comply with BR’s type 5 specification but its axle loading exceeded BR’s limits, despite being refitted with type 47 bogies. 1971 Sold off to Russia 1993 Broken up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_George_White,_1st_Baronet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Omnibus_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Cars http://www.frazer-nash.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_HS4000 dhig is this the longest edit of a post ever?

I do wish now I'd insisted on my son not 'upgrading' it to a VW T5 turbo diesel.

Curiously (and revealingly) I misread 'trans people' as 'trains people' throughout K's post and it made total sense to me. I think its also to do with the whole psychodynamic thing of being on (or off) the rails, absolute block signalling and the old BR Rule Book we all had to sign for. dhig ed: changed the word thread to post

ASV 996 looks to me to be an attractive mystery tourer body on Austin 10. Reminds me of the early 1930s Swallow bodies made at Blackpool, but by the mid 1930s they were almost entirely on Standard chasses (Standard Swallow) and Bill Lyons was about to morph the firm into SS Jaguar. DS 91XX I think is a Heavy 12. The were much loved by farmers around our way in N Derbyshire and the Cheshire highlands in the 1950s - all running on Tractor Vapourising Oil (TVO). My earliest drinking forays were with a pal who was doing his year's farming experience at a farm in Wormhill (canal builder Brindley's birthplace above Millers Dale) prior to going off to Harpur Adams. He would arrive proudly driving his boss's Heavy 12 and whizz all us Sixth Formers out to a remote spot where the ancient landlady filled pottery mugs with ale from an enamel jug fetched up from the cellar. There was an intense dark fug of TVO fumes in that old car that made all our eyes water. dhig

1 I do like those 'down at eye level' pics you've started posting of the model - increasingly difficult to tell Stork from butter in your comparisons. 2 Good grief! That Shredded Wheat box Shakey tunnel mouth still xtant? I thought you'd commissioned quality modellers to replace it yonks ago. Really looking forward to the cliffs bit ( even if it's just wall paper pasted on an insulation panel for a while, deputising for the real McCoy. distressed placky. Dhig

But don't you get a weird buzz when you see misguided souls expending huge amounts of sweat as well as equity preserving what you regarded as cheap trash when they slipped thru your hands en route to the scrapyard gate ? That for me includes Land Crabs and other near death British Leyland heaps and OTT yank style Vauxhalls (as well as that Dyane above - and similar paper thin Renault 4s). dhig

Agreed - particularly light commercial vehicles. I bought a very suave VW Type 4 Caravelle from a delightful octogenarian 'Jimmy Shand and his band' style band leader in the Edinburgh New Town that had been imported from Japan to convey US tourists around West Aberdeenshire distilleries before 'my' bandleader bought it for his band's use. [and it wasn't till I came to fill it up a week later down on Tyneside I found it not to be a 2.4 turbo diesel but 2.5litre petrol!] Maltese car dealer friends tell me the Japanese two year limit on vehicles is Japanese Gov. legislation intended originally to stimulate the regeneration of the Japanese car industry after their big economic recession 20 years before our 208/9 one. dhig

OK - back OT Lunchtime on Shrewsbury station was where one could often admire ex-works locos out of Crewe, likewise the GC.Hayfield branch past the bottom of our school playing fields was the place to catch an apple green loco with a crowded footplate, ex-works Gorton, everyone enjoying a ight engine summers' day jaunt But in response to Westerner's post #5840 about workaday GW locos, the Western locos one glimpsed while passing by Crewe South shed always appeared markedly cleaner than 'our own' LM familiars. dhig

I enjoyed your reference to EAR red locos. Would you permit this 'Wheneye' story OT ? I had quite a few building projects in the late 1960s in Tabora - a railway junction in central Tanzania and the beautifully clean crimson lake steam locos were a huge distraction from my project management assignments. Once a month I'd stay in the EAR Tabora hotel for a week - an extraordinary Bavarian summer palace built in 1914 on axis with the Railway station (steep north German stepped gables). The whole had been readied for the Kaiser to arrive in October 1914 to declare Tabora to be the future capital for Deutsches Ost Afrika. The last makeover it had was for Princess Elizabeth's stay - which likewise never happened after she'd heard at Treetops in Kenya of the death of her father George VI. I was lucky enough to make friends with Big Ken from Horwich works who lived in the railway hotel (and had his own box of Manx kippers delivered by rail parcels once a month). A larger than life Lancashire character in the Fred Dibnah manner, he appeared to have responsibility for every aspect of the line onto the lakes. But his pride and joy was a rickety tower trolley which he would ride atop through floods with the Model T Ford engine puttering alongside, driving a chain that diappeared into the muddy waters below. dhig

Has it had some more effective headlights fitted to make it safer in those pitch dark deepset Cornish lanes? My Grandad updated from his Morris Cowley flatnose to a pre-war series E in about 1952/3 - but I remember the headlamp glasses canted back at about 60 degrees to follow the curve of the wings.

That first view in the gulley at rail level through the tunnel is beautifully sharp and convincing. And am I the first visitor to claim I had a very interrupted night's sleep on one of those handsome Night Ferry sleeping cars pictured on your thread? All the chaining down to the train ferry made a terrible din in yer ear'ole through the pillow. dhig

Thought I'd dig back on this thread because I remembered some posting when they were first seen. So they arrived about mid May, and away again end of first week in September - about 15 weeks. In the days of telegraph poles along railway lines, you would see birds gathering to begin migration, I haven't noticed that recently. dhig

After a drop of rain and a cloudy late afternoon yesterday (Sunday) we were rewarded with a perfect evening. There was a bat circling round in the dusk, still a few rooks flapping noisily about trying to find somewhere to roost. Two owls were busy hunting in the dene, sometimes a perfect call and reponse, more often a discordant clash. We'd been down south in Warwicks and N Oxfordshire last weeke-end. There were still swifts and swallows circling above us on Tyneside before we left, I've not seen any since we got back. Does anyone else wonder whether they'll see them again next year? dh

Thanks for those excellent pics of the Cromford Mill and the layouts. Makes one quite nostalgic for the Derbyshire of our yoof. It was always well dark on a Friday night by the time we reached Matlock from St Pancras, wife would always be nervous about getting all our stuff together for the Millers Dale change. I always loved sticking my head out of the window to catch the fresh night air up Monsal Dale. dhig PS Midland General in Matlock!

For the last week, as it has got noticably darker each night, huge flights (I'm talking several hundreds) of noisy rooks have been careering around over the trees surrounding our garden from about 8.30 until it is totally dark. Why? I heard it suggested they are young birdsoverspilling from established rookeries trying to find places to roost - is that the case? in other words is it a bird version of our current affordable housing crisis for the young? dhig